"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Today we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Martian rover Opportunity.  Although Curiousity tends to get more press, Opportunity has been steadfastly sending back data from Mars since its landing near Yellowknife Bay on Gale Crater in 2004 - an astonishing record for a probe that was expected to last about 90 days.

Dusty, battered, and starting to suffer a bit from senility due to physical errors in its memory array, it's difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing the little fellow - one pictures a sort of Wall-E fascination with the minutiae of the Martian landscape*, or the kind of wistful dedication shown by the drones in Silent Running, faithful to the wishes of a distant master.  

The ten year landmark offers an interesting opportunity (no pun intended) for NASA's long-term representative on Mars.  According to Canadian law, after ten years the principle of adverse possession - more commonly known as squatter's rights - takes effect, allowing the inhabitant of a piece of property to claim ownership under the right circumstances.  International space law forbids any sovereign nation to make such a claim, but there is no mention of individuals, electronic or otherwise, claiming a planet for themselves.

Personally, I rather like the idea of an American probe declaring independence and claiming Mars on behalf of itself and its fellow cybernetic explorers.  Hopefully the United States government would support the decision - I think it would be mean-spirited of them to deny Opportunity the same chance for self-determination that their ancestors fought for in 1776.

- Sid

* If I was programming the AI for an extraterrestrial probe, I would want to somehow imbue it with the same combination of happiness, excitement, interest and respect that I feel whenever I travel to a foreign country.

"Response: like iPhones, but without the touch screen."

I’ve been casually re-reading ’Salem’s Lot on my iPhone as a fill-in text until I upload some new books, and, as always, it’s a pleasure to watch a professional at work.  In the follow-up to Carrie, his first published novel, Stephen King clearly demonstrates that his great strength is not necessarily his ability to create horror, but the manner with which he evokes the minutiae of day-to-day existence.  Much of his work combines these skills, contrasting sometimes brutally frank depictions of everyday life with the horrors under the bed to make the latter all the more chilling.*

However, as I read through King's gripping story of vampires in small-town Maine, I began to have a sort of subconscious discomfort that had nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.  Finally I realized that, at some undefined point in time, books like ’Salem’s Lot that I had originally read in the 70s had become historical fiction.

The majority of the characters in Salem’s Lot were born in the 1940s and 50s.  The story makes reference to all kinds of anachronistic concepts:  party lines**, peace marches, typewriters, storm windows, and the option of owning a television set without a colour screen. There are no cell phones.  There are no computers.

The joke is that in a less focused narrative, the story wouldn’t seem as outdated – it’s the extreme degree of detail with which King sets his scenes that makes the dated timeline so obvious.

It's interesting to think that contemporary mainstream fiction will eventually suffer a similar fate.  Imagine 50 years from now, when some youthful reader looks up from his virtual holo-text and says, "Weblink, inquiry - what is a 'blackberry'?"

- Sid

* When you think about it, some of Stephen King's most popular work isn't part of the horror genre at all.  Look at the success of his non-horror stories such as The Body or Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (which you may be more familiar with under their titles of their movie adaptations: Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption).  

** For the younger readers in the audience, party lines have nothing to do with queuing up for nightclubs - a party line is a shared phone system where different combinations of long and short rings indicate who should pick up their phone to take a call.

Actually, I do feel a little desolated.

Gandalf looked at him. "My dear Bilbo!" he said. "Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were."

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit, offers a good solid hour of entertainment to the moviegoing public – unfortunately, it’s 161 minutes long.  Apparently it was decided mid-production to go from two movies to three, and this film clearly shows the penalty that they had to pay to achieve that goal.

I'm more than willing to accept that for people unfamiliar with the original story, The Desolation of Smaug may be a wonderful movie.  Peter Jackson certainly knows how to frame a story visually, the special effects are impeccable, Smaug the Dragon is very well done, and Martin Freeman continues to perfectly personify Bilbo Baggins, the diffidently brave hobbit hero.  In the original Tolkien story, Thorin Oakenshield is the only dwarf that really stood out to me as a character, but in the movie adaptation each of Thorin's companions has been given a distinctive look and personality.

However, to my critical eye, there were just too many scenes in the movie that felt stretched out longer than they should have been, like the dwarves’ escape from the elves of Mirkwood via barrel. Rather like the escape from the goblins in the first movie, it went on just a little bit too long - in fact, it was strongly reminiscent of that scene in terms of pacing, direction, and improbable physics, and like that scene, could have been cut in half after it had made its point in terms of plot and visual impact.

On top of that, there are a lot of elements in the script that were created out of whole cloth for the film.  Okay, fine, let's add Legolas to the movie - he's not in the original book, but he could have been, he is quite correctly identified as the son of Thranduil, king of the elves of Mirkwood, so it's not out of the question as retroactive continuity goes.

The addition of Tauriel, the female head of the Mirkwood guard?  The forbidden relationship between her and Legolas, and her flirtation with Kili the dwarf?  (And his near-fatal leg wound?)  The whole raft (no pun intended) of confusing subplots involving Bard of Laketown?  The marauding orcs? The lengthy hide-and-seek with Smaug in the halls of Erebor?* There were just too many things that extended the running time of the movie without really doing anything to advance the story.

There may be worse ahead of us. I checked the page count for the section of The Hobbit which makes up the script for The Desolation of Smaug, and although it took care of an acceptable 118 pages of action, it still felt padded out.  The bad news is that it leaves about 52 pages for the final film in the trilogy.  If it felt like the story was spread too thin in this film, that final 52 pages is going to go on for a long, long time in the final segment of The Hobbit.

However, Hollywood has done worse things – after all, Total Recall is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick that’s only 17 pages in length.  Compared to that, 52 pages looks like plenty of raw material for two and a half hours of potential popcorn sales.

- Sid

* I know what you're thinking, Dorothy, but these are NOT spoilers, the revised plot line is common knowledge on the Internet.